Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2018-12-24

As anyone paying attention to The Signpost this year has noticed, the publication has been struggling. So has the team. One of the struggles that has recently cropped up is in how to deal with reporting that involves specific members of the Wikipedian community and wider Wikimedia movement. For example, what type of Wikimedian-specific content, if any, should we cover? Are critical pieces of specific Foundation members acceptable? What about controversies surrounding members of the community, such as chapter board members or notable Wikimedians? Is the line drawn at trawling

Prior issues have contained content which criticized specific people, and which reported on conflicts and controversies between particular users; reader responses have been mixed, with some condemning it, others criticizing it, and still others commending the commentary. While the support is encouraging, the criticisms, some of which are borderline personal attacks and harrassment in a venue that is considered by some to be a safe haven from our

At The Signpost, as in Wikipedia generally,

Smallbones has been a Wikipedia editor for 13 years, contributing to The Signpost regarding paid editing and financial market regulation. He has a Ph.D. in finance and professional experience in finance.

On November 30, 2018, the United States

The FOIA release included an email from the head of the scam company, which stated "Let's build a Wikipedia page and use Whitaker to make it credible."[4] The editing of Wikipedia articles by scammers is nothing new. For example, editing by employees of binary options scammer Banc de Binary was at times openly declared. Politicians and government officials have also edited articles promoting their careers, including Corey Stewart, who ran in the 2017 Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary while telling CNN of his campaign's Wikipedia edits.^[5] But the possible combination of edits made by outright scammers with the possible participation of an official who later achieved a position as high as Acting U.S. Attorney General is unprecedented.

A Signpost investigation of the released documents

Whitaker's football career plays an important part in this investigation. He played football at the University of Iowa for the 1990, 1991, and 1992 seasons including the 1991 Rose Bowl.

While he played in 33 games as a tight end, he was not really a star, catching only 21 passes in his career for 202 yards and two touchdowns.^[9] In 1991, his best year, at least four other Iowa receivers surpassed him in each of the above categories.^[10] But he was a good student, being honored with the Big Ten Award for University of Iowa student-athletes for each of his three years.

His resume, shown in the FOIA release, was attached to an email to Scott Cooper, CEO of WPM. Both the resume and email contained the claim that he was named an Academic All-American.^[11] He was not. A spokesperson for the awarding organization, the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA), told the Signpost that Whitaker is not listed as an Academic All-American.^[12][13] Whitaker made the claim not just while applying for an advisory board position at WPM, but also later on the website of the law firm where he was the managing partner,^[14] and on a Department of Justice website announcing his 2009 resignation as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa.^[15]

Whitaker graduated while still playing football and immediately began his legal studies. His law career began slowly with several small law firms. In 2002, he ran for the Iowa state office of Treasurer, losing with 43% of the vote.^[16] In 2004, as a fairly young and inexperienced lawyer, President George W. Bush appointed him to the office of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. A Democratic U.S. Attorney replaced him in 2009 and Whitaker resumed private legal practice in a small firm that he headed in Des Moines, Iowa.

In 2006, while Whitaker was still U.S. Attorney, the editor User:Whimat made his only four edits, taking a total of less than 15 minutes. The first and last edits were to the Iowa Hawkeyes football article, listing Matthew G. Whitaker as a "notable player". The editor's second edit was to create the article United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa which named Whitaker as the current officeholder. The editor's third edit was to create the article Matthew Whitaker (attorney), a short and factual article that named him as a former Iowa football player.

While continuing to work with his law firm, on October 15, 2014, Whitaker joined the WPM advisory board. Several members of this board did not actively contribute to WPM's operations, but allowed it to use their names and photos for marketing purposes. Whitaker was more involved with the company. He was paid for some legal advice and answered or forwarded emails from disgruntled customers. He even discussed appearing in WPM marketing videos.^[17]

On November 21, 2014, WPM's CEO, Scott Cooper, suggested "Let's build a Wikipedia page and use Whitaker to make it credible".^[4] There's no record of an attempt to create an article on WPM at this time, but on December 29 User:Vinnylabarbera added links to the websites of both Whitaker's law office and WPM to the article on Whitaker. The FOIA release lists a business associate of WPM with a nearly identical name as the CEO of an online PR firm. The same editor drafted an article on another member of the WPM advisory board at User:Vinnylabarbera/sandbox.^[18]

The simple external links added to the text were later supplemented by other editors, with the section on WPM in the Whitaker article growing into a very large paragraph by the time Whitaker was named Acting Attorney General.

In October 2017 Whitaker was appointed to be chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The FTC had previously subpoenaed documents from Whitaker related to the WPM case. A surprised FTC investigator emailed his colleagues "You're not going to believe this. Matt Whitaker is now chief of staff to the Attorney General. Of the United States."^[19]

FTC staff reminded Whitaker by voicemail that the subpoenaed material was overdue. Whitaker's voicemail response was included in the FOIA release. According to The Washington Post, the subpoenaed material was likely never given to the FTC.^[19]

On November 7, 2018, the FTC staff were surprised again. Whitaker had just been appointed Acting Attorney General by President Trump. The staff anticipated questions from reporters and seemed anxious about how much information about Whitaker and the scam was already public. What to do? They checked the Wikipedia article on Whitaker. One staffer wrote

With Sessions' resignation, the Acting AG is Matthew Whitaker. Whitaker was an "Advisory Board" member of World Patent Marketing, and may have done some legal work for Scott Cooper. We subpoenaed his law firm last year. His Wikipedia page has a whole paragraph on his involvement with WPM (as of the sending of this email). Wanted to give you a heads-up in case there is press/public attention.^[20]

The section of our article on Whitaker that started with the insertion of an external link to WPM had grown to a 218-word paragraph with five references.

Several questions about Matthew Whitaker and World Patent Marketing were considered in this Signpost investigation.

• Did WPM, as it had planned, submit an article about itself to Wikipedia using Whitaker's name to give the company credibility?
  • No evidence of such a submission was found.
• Did WPM edit Wikipedia to help promote its scam?
  • Some of the evidence relies on the name of a user account that is nearly identical to the name of the CEO of a PR firm that worked for WPM. Like much on-wiki evidence, it can not be definitively proved that the user account was used to edit by WPM's PR agent. That said, there is circumstantial evidence that WPM’s PR agent linked the article on Whittaker to WPM's website, and that he submitted a draft article about another member of WPM's advisory board.
• Did Matthew Whitaker create an autobiographical article on Wikipedia?
  • Given the limitations of on-wiki evidence it is impossible to say for sure, but there is evidence that he did create the Wikipedia article about himself.
• Did Whitaker mislead the American people?
  • Based on evidence contained in the FOIA release published by the FTC and other evidence discovered in this investigation about his claim of being awarded the prestigious Academic All-American honor:
    • Whitaker misled Scott Cooper of WPM when he submitted his resume and a cover email.
    • He misled his current and potential legal clients when he posted the claim on his law firm's website.
    • He misled everyone when he repeated the claim on a Department of Justice website.

Matthew Whitaker and the Department of Justice's Office of Public Affairs did not respond to emailed requests for comment by copy-deadline.

After the publication of this article, Steve Roe, the University of Iowa Assistant Athletic Director for Communications contacted The Signpost, noting that the 1993 Media Guide for University of Iowa Football cited Whitaker as "GTE District VII academic all-American", which might explain Whitaker's claims.

The media guide should have more accurately stated "GTE District VII Academic All-District".

Given the possibility that Whitaker might also have been confused about the status of his award or relied on the Media Guide, we have replaced the word "lied" with "misled" in the text under "Conclusion".

In 2018, the fourteenth year of The Signpost, a total of 157 articles have been published spanning 12 issues from January to December. Collectively these 157 articles, created by 64 Wikipedia users, have received a total of 353,134 pageviews until 7 December. After including views from the first page and the single-page edition the pageviews sum reaches 388,484. These 12 issues have also seen a total of 1,222 comments, totaling 96,473 words.^[a]

The

• The article in The Signpost which has the highest all-time pageviews in 2018 is "Death knell sounding for The Signpost?". Out of the 157 articles it is the only article to have crossed 5,000 views this year. However, when considering highest page views attained in one week, the article "News and notes: Flying high; low practice from Wikipedia 'cleansing' agency; where do our donations go? RfA sees a new trend" has the most with 2,290 pageviews.
• On average, an article in 2018 got 848 pageviews in one week and 2,387 all-time page views.
• Only five articles in 2018 have crossed 4,000 page views (all time), listed below:

• Average views per article (one week total) for the first six months – January to May – is 780, and for the last six months – June to December – is 906. Although this indicates a general increase in readership per article from the beginning of 2018 to the end of the year, this increase in readership cannot be observed when average all-time views per article are considered.
• Over 80% of all page views of any given Signpost article come in the first four weeks.

Which categories of articles get the most pageviews?

• "Op-ed" and "From the editor" articles have the highest average pageviews (one week totals). "Op-ed" articles get an average of 1,340 pageviews and "From the editor" articles 1,320 pageviews. Gallery articles get the least pageviews.

How many users have contributed to The Signpost in 2018?

• 10 Wikipedia users for The Signpost in 2018 amount to 72.8% of the total byline mentions, with the remaining 54 users accounting for the remaining 27.2% of byline mentions. (This includes bylines for 'essays', 'from the archives' and 'blogs', which may have just been "selected" by the user.)
• 103 articles out of the 157 have only one name in the byline; that is, 65.6% have either been written or compiled by one user. The remaining 54 articles have two or more names in the bylines.

How many comments did The Signpost get in 2018?

• Seven articles in 2018 (Issue 1 to Issue 12) generated comments crossing 4,000 words. 42 articles got one or no comments.

How many users subscribe to the The Signpost?

A total of 1,149 users have added their names to the user-talk page delivery list. Template subscription transclusions total 2,007, whereas the global delivery list currently has 227 users.

Footnotes

Arbitration Committee election 2018

A total of 2,209 users voted for the 13 candidates in the running. Of these, 91 were discarded because the voter had voted twice, and 13 were struck. The full list of voters was published at List votes: 2018 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election. The results were announced on 14 December, with

Remaining in office for the second year of their term are BU Rob13, Opabinia regalis, KrakatoaKatie, Premeditated Chaos, Callanecc, RickinBaltimore, and Worm That Turned.

Community wish list results

As reported in last month's issue of The Signpost in Special Report, the WMF's wish list poll for software development closed on 30 November. The results were announced on 4 December with a total 7,282 support votes recorded for the 212 proposals. Leading the poll in the top position with 157 votes was the request by the New Page Reviewers with a proposal by Insertcleverphrasehere for 19 urgently needed open Phabricator tickets to be addressed. A fairly close second with 130 votes was the request for work on five open Phabricator tickets was the proposal by Premeditated Chaos for 'Some kind of toggleable dark or night-mode like YouTube or TV Tropes', because: "Wikipedia skins are very bright, and at night they can be hard on the eyes."

The rationale for the improvement to the suite of New Page Curation tools was: "New Page Review is a key process on Wikipedia, and the only firewall that prevents inappropriate new pages being added to the Encyclopedia. However, there are many longstanding issues with the Page Curation tools and the New Pages feed which inhibit efficiency and cause problems to be overlooked. Aside from a few additions made when the Growth Team added Articles for Creation (AfC) drafts to the New Page Feed last year, the tools haven't been supported for many years and the list of proposed developments is long. These include bugs, features never implemented, and suggested improvements which have been left unaddressed. While a few requests for improvement of the tools used by New Page Reviewers can be addressed by on-wiki customisation by volunteers, most others are part of the Mediawiki software and require the intervention of the WMF developers."

The full list of results is at m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Results.

Brief notes

• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Galobtter, who obtained the suite of admin tools at their RfA with 208/46/12 (82%) in yet another contentious RfA that incited much discussion in the comments section – reinforcing the new trend. With three admins nominating, over 70 of the 208 supporters were admins. Among the 46 voters opposing were 6 admins. The oppose rationales included claims that the candidate's edit count was 'only' 25,000 with 'only' 8,000 to mainspace, and relatively short tenure. One support and one oppose both from the same sock farm, were struck. This makes a total of 10 new admins for 2018 – less than half the number for the previous year, demonstrating again RfA's inverse Moore's law.
• Emergency desysopping: The
  level 1 desysopping procedures for compromised accounts were effected on the accounts of Orangemike, Killiondude, Garzo, and Esanchez7587 precipitating a discussion that is taking place at the Village Pump on a proposal to tighten up the admin inactivity procedure with suggestions for mandatory two factor authentication
  (2FA) for admins. Following satisfactory explanations, the tools were restored to the accounts Orangemike and Killiondude while Garzo and Esanchez7587 are users whose accounts have been dormant for many years.
• Retired admins: Six admins were desysopped on 1 December under the inactivity policy. One further admin voluntarily retired their tools for personal reasons and inactivity.

• WMF staff reshuffle: Maggie Dennis is "...excited that we have located a new chief [of Community Engagement (CE)], who will join us in January 2019, whereupon I will transition to the role of Vice President of Support and Services. CE is a Wikimedia Foundation staff department of over 40 people focused on the goal of increasing the quantity, quality, diversity, and reach of free knowledge by supporting people and organizations aligned with the Wikimedia Foundation mission. We support contributors by representing them in the development of new technical tools."

WMF trumped again?

• Wikipedia engages the ‘nuclear option’ after Trump penis hack: reported in
  John Cline
  , Brandom refers to a thread in which criticisms are expressed on unilateral action from the WMF. The Foundation responded to The Verge with: “Our Security department will be implementing new, more comprehensive password policies,” and “working with volunteers to raise awareness of password best practices among our volunteers to help prevent this kind of vandalism and account abuse in the future.”